The Times - UK (2022-04-30)

8 saturday review Saturday April 30 2022 | the times

T

he past is always part of
the present in pop.
When Saint Etienne
started out in 1990 we
were heavily influenced
by the house and techno
scenes exploding across
the country, but also by our record collec-
tions — anything from the Beach Boys to
Pet Shop Boys fed into our early songwrit-
ing. As the group became more of a part-
time concern in the late Nineties, I went
back to my first love, music writing. I
thought I had a pretty good grasp of the
rock era, the fabled tale that begins with
Elvis Presley, then travels through Mo-
town, the Beatles, punk, hip-hop and rave.
Yet while writing Yeah Yeah Yeah:
The Story of Modern Pop
about a decade ago, there
was a constant nag in
my mind that I was
ignoring a back
story. It wasn’t as if
the country, R&B
and Italianate
pop that influ-
enced Presley
had come from
nowhere.
There was a
pre-history that
went back to the
first recorded music,
right back to the turn
of the 20th century. I had
clots of knowledge about the
Songbook writers, and New Or-
leans, and blues, and early Hollywood
musicals. I had read exemplary books on
individual genres, but they rarely men-
tioned the myriad other contemporane-
ous pop forms. So much tended to be slung
into an all-purpose folder labelled “old-
time music”. I realised that there wasn’t a
book explaining what popular music had

sounded or felt like — or even explained

what was truly popular, and when —

before rock’n’roll. I thought I’d give it a go.

The result is Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop.

My aim was to be a guide through the pop-

ular music of the first half of the 20th

century, unravelling all the genres, styles

and names that can seem tangled to the

casual fan of George Gershwin, Billie

Holiday, Duke Ellington or Rodgers and

Hammerstein, and finding the silver

threads and golden needles that bound

them all together.

Pop is a term we can take for granted.

What exactly makes pop music? For me,

its essence is the record — the grooves, the

label, the feel of permanence. The act of

listening to something more than

once, of playing a record again

and again, separates “pop”

from the merely “popu-

lar”. The advent of

records affected

the way music was

written, played

and performed

— if a 78rpm

disc could han-

dle only three

minutes of

music, then a

song couldn’t be

more than three

minutes long.

The year 1900 is the

sweet spot, the year when

a new musical form, ragtime,

linked arms with the nascent pop

music industry and launched the 20th

century. It also created the pop era’s first

heroic, tragic figure in Scott Joplin, who

died broke in an asylum, having failed to

convince the world that ragtime was an art

form rather than just good-time music.

The story then weaves through the fall

of British pop influence during the First

World War (until 1914, the West End of

London had been regarded as pop’s epi-

centre), the rise of the American jazz age in

the 1920s, the sound of swing, and the tri-

umphs of Broadway and Hollywood musi-

cals in the Thirties and Forties.

After the war, pop’s forward motion

faltered; we entered an era that gave us

some extraordinary music, but lacked

direction; when the Songbook writers

were in decline and jazz splintered; when

Frank Sinatra made his hippest and

best albums, but with songs that were

mostly decades old.

Rock’n’roll moved into this vacuum in

the mid-Fifties and the Beatles presaged

an unlikely swing of the compass from

New York back to London in the 1960s.

The modern age was upon us.

While writing the book, I discovered

plenty of things I wasn’t expecting. Occa-

sionally, wartime calamities shaped the

future. During the First World War the

baritone Jacob Schmidt was caught in a

mustard gas attack that permanently af-

fected his voice; he re-emerged in the

Twenties as Whispering Jack Smith with

his hit song Me and My Shadow. His voice

was so soft it was inaudible on stage, but

was perfect for the intimate new world of

radio — the crooner was created.

The Germans used their newly invented

tape recordings in the Second World War

to give the impression that Hitler could be

in eight places at the same time; the tech-

nology was brought home by victorious

American soldiers and adapted so Bing

Crosby could play golf while his radio

show was supposedly being broadcast live.

Another unforeseen consequence of the

war was that it broke up the swing bands,

putting the postwar focus on solo singers

such as Sinatra and Peggy Lee. Likewise,

no one could have guessed that Tin Pan

Alley’s infantilism in the early Fifties (typi-

fied by How Much Is that Doggie in the

Window) would leave the door open for the

music of the underclasses — rhythm and

blues, country and western — to win back

the youth crowd with the schism of

rock’n’roll.

I became fascinated by how the Great

American Songbook, the music of the

nation’s second-generation immigrants,

was a construct that its creators pieced to-

gether once its commercial hold began to

slip in the Fifties; the term Great American

Songbook wasn’t used until a Carmen

McRae album in 1972.

I love it when a “fake” form does some-

thing that the “real” or “proper” original

has failed to, whether it’s Irving Berlin

key players Hazel Scott

and her trio in 1945

music

Let’s get this party started! How pop

The music writer and founding member

of Saint Etienne Bob Stanley reveals the

discoveries he made about the origins of pop

while researching his new book, Let’s Do It

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fired up Peggy Lee performing in 1965. Top: Elvis Presley in the 1950s